Word: bertillon
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...house of the title is the Banque Mercure, a private bank for rich speculators flourishing in Paris during the grim days of 1931. (By no coincidence there was a famous whorehouse of the same name.) To the financial world it is known simply as Bertillon because its presiding and all-powerful genius is sexy, elegant Jules Bertillon. Jules buys when the rest of the world is selling and he and his clients get rich as Europe sinks...
...thieves, underground Communists, wives, children -and mistresses, mistresses, mistresses. There is no plot, only the fitfully told story of Jules' inevitable catastrophe. Mostly to affront the pretensions of a speculator he despises, Jules bets on the pound shortly before it collapses. Though there is still time to hedge, Bertillon of Bertillon goes down with his pride...
Author Thorwald considers his sub ject in four tidy divisions. ∙ CRIMINAL IDENTIFICATION, the funda mental problem of detection, began to be a science in 1879, when Alphonse Bertillon introduced a system of anthropometry involving some eleven bodily measurements of each criminal. Fingerprinting, long a form of signature in the Orient, was introduced to Europe by Britain's William Herschel, and it had to compete with anthropometry until 1904, when two prisoners at Fort Leavenworth were found to have identi cal features, practically identical anthropometric measurements and identical names: Will West. Only their fingerprints were different, and within seven...
...wordplay, both criminal and legal. An Englishman kicked off his boots on the gallows to disprove his mother's prophecy that he would die in them; a British judge, asked why he dubbed a certain barrister "Necessity," answered: "Because he knows no law." It corrects popular misconceptions: Bertillon, far from creating fingerprint identifications, was skeptical of their value. It shows how greatly writers can misconceive: Conan Doyle protested that developing character in detective stories could only endanger the plot. Perhaps its most unforgettable statement is a sentence concerning Scotland's High Court of Justiciary. "The maximum penalty which...
Suspense (Mon. 8 p.m., CBS). Charles Boyer in The Bertillon Method...